In late 2024, an clothing shop made headlines for a decision that sounded extreme: they went entirely cash-only. The reason? Their point-of-sale and POS systems had crashed eight times in a single month. Payments couldn’t be taken. Bills couldn’t be paid. The business lost approximately eight weeks of revenue. The owners said publicly that they made the switch to cash not out of preference but “to survive”—because when the money simply disappears into a digital void and no one has answers, the business itself is at risk.

This isn’t an isolated story. Research shows that POS outages cost the average retailer up to TSH 200,000 per week. There are businesses today operating on POS hardware that is five, six, or seven years old—slow when it works, prone to crashes under load, and simply unable to keep up with modern transaction volumes. Worse, 67% of consumers will abandon a purchase because of a slow checkout. The technology that was supposed to make business easier becomes the reason customers walk away.